Putin making hay while his ‘useful idiot’ remains in office

"The world no longer needs Special Counsel Robert Mueller to tell it that with the election of Trump in 2016, Putin got his man in the Oval Office."

Cartoon by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News

KGB agents like Vladimir Putin have always been very good at spotting and employing people they call “useful idiots.”

Usually the idiots have been socialists or communist fellow travellers among Russia’s enemies who are easily persuaded to promote Moscow’s case.

But not always. Sometimes the useful idiots are merely foreign politicians or movers-and-shakers whose interests and views of the world coincided with those of Moscow.

Donald Trump falls into this category.

The world no longer needs Special Counsel Robert Mueller to tell it that with the election of Trump in 2016, Putin got his man in the Oval Office.

The United States Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Tuesday confirming what Washington’s intelligence agencies have been saying for months. Putin threw the full weight of his propaganda and cyber espionage battalions behind the effort to get Trump elected.

Whether Trump, his family and campaign mafioso “colluded” with the Russians is almost irrelevant at this point. Everything that Trump has said and done on the international stage since coming to office has been in the interests of Putin’s Russia and not those of the U.S. and its allies. Trump has moved with persistent determination to demolish all the trade and security alliances and institutions the U.S. has been foremost in creating since the Second World War. Only Putin’s Russia and, waiting in the wings, Xi Jinpiung’s China, benefit from Trump’s hubris and criminal stupidity.

It’s not that Trump is a traitor to the U.S. in the classic sense, as some eminent commentators have written.

There was no moment when Trump kissed Putin’s ring. By his character and nature Trump was pre-programmed to betray the U.S., and Putin – alert KGB man that he is – saw a pigeon ready for the plucking.

Trump is a narcissist who, lacking any creative urges or abilities, uses chaos and destruction to ensure the focus of attention is always on him. Like many weak and self-pitying people, Trump is a bully who berates all those around him to hide the fact that he has nothing sensible to say and no vision of what might be created. He strikes out because he fears more knowledgeable and insightful people may expose his unplumbed shallowness. He lies because he fears the truth.

So, since the U.S. confirmed that it is a failing, gerrymandered democracy and put Trump in the Oval Office, the world has seen him flaying about like a boy with a stick in a nettle patch.

Trump has denounced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as “obsolete” and pointedly shied away from committing to the pledge to mutual defence that is at the heart of the alliance. He has rudely dismissed all Washington’s trade alliances, especially the free-trade pact with Canada and Mexico, as means by which the U.S. is bled dry. The World Trade Organization has treated the U.S. “very badly.” In an unmatched piece of absurd ignorance, Trump even said the European Union “was put there to take advantage of the United States.”

Any hopes that Trump’s pompous malevolence might be just an act to placate his “base” were conclusively sunk at the summit of the G-7 major industrialized countries in Quebec last month. Trump was recalcitrant throughout the meeting, backed off signing the final communique, and then, while flying away on Airforce One, Tweeted that his host, Justin Trudeau, was “Very dishonest and weak.”

While Trump is President, the G-7 is defunct.

Having abused the best friends of the U.S., Trump flew to Singapore to fawn on North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, one of the world’s nastiest despots with a record of killing even his closest relatives who get out of line.

But Kim played Trump like a violin. In return for giving Trump a glossy ten-by-eight of them shaking hands and a meaningless piece of paper with vague promises about peace and plenty, Kim got recognition from Washington that North Korea is in the club of nuclear weapons powers. He also got a de facto end to economic sanctions.

Since then, Kim has confirmed that his commitment to “de-nuclearization” of the Korean peninsular is so far in the future as to be out of sight by restarting his weapons program.

This makes dangerously stupid Trump’s boast that the world is now safer than when he met Kim. It’s been said many times, but Trump is not a man to be trusted to lead what is still the world’s major military superpower.

The denouement of this appalling story may come next week when Trump is due to attend the summit of the 29 NATO member states in Brussels. After what will undoubtedly be a difficult and perhaps even catastrophic summit, Trump is due to fly to Helsinki for a one-on-one with Putin. The imagery of Pinocchio rushing to Geppetto’s arms is too outlandish to contemplate. Apparently, no one in the White House has the slightest clue about visuals.

Trump has strewn confusion along the path to this meeting by refusing to rule out recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which it took from Ukraine in 2014. A whole raft of United Nations-backed sanctions against Russia stem from this annexation and Moscow’s invasion of occupation of tracts of eastern Ukraine.

In classic bully style of hitting out before being hit, Trump set the stage for the summit by firing off nasty letters to several of the NATO leaders. All the letters were variations on the theme that most NATO members are defrauding the U.S. by not spending two per cent of their gross national products on defence, as they have committed to do. Most NATO countries have increased defence spending since Trump railed at them last year. But Trump clearly has no understanding of the nuances of analysis involved in defence spending.

For example, Greece has for years spent more than two per cent of GDP on defence. But large hunks of that money go on pensions for veterans and a large standing army that is far from being battle-ready. In contrast, Norway still spends less than two per cent of GDP, but its troops are well-equipped, well-trained and among the first to deploy to any NATO campaign.

While it is unlikely that Trump will be able to kick the skids out from under NATO and destroy the alliance that has sustained peace and prosperity over much of the world since its founding in 1949, members are increasingly apprehensive.

The creation of an integrated European defence force is already underway, and there are rumours of current NATO members exploring informal alliances and deeper defence co-operation. A big question is what happens to Britain, which provides Europe’s most potent military, once it leave the European Union at the end of March next year.

If the Canadian government is not already thinking about post-NATO options, it had better start quickly.

As the friends and enemies of the U.S. contemplate the Fourth of July, 2018, a looming question is whether Trump is a temporary aberration and that life will return to normal after the 2020 presidential elections.

That is a dangerous straw of hope to cling to. Trump is the symptom of a deep-seated disease in U.S. politics and society. His ravings echo and lead a chorus of anger, frustration and fear among large segments of U.S. society. There is no sign that anyone in the political or civil society classes have the slightest idea of how to remake America before it cascades into what German economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 called the “gale of Creative Destruction.”

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Jonathan Manthorpe is the author of “Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan,” published by Palgrave-Macmillan. He has been a foreign correspondent and international affairs columnist for nearly 40 years. He was European bureau chief for the Toronto Star and then Southam News in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1989 he was appointed Africa correspondent by Southam News and in 1993 was posted to Hong Kong to cover Asia. For the last few years he has been based in Vancouver, writing international affairs columns for what is now the Postmedia Group. He left the group last year and now writes for a range of newspapers and websites. [email protected]